Vortices are localized planar structures that attain topological stability and can be used to describe collective behavior in a diversity of situations of current interest in nonlinear science. In high energy physics, vortices engender integer winding number and appear under the presence of a local Abelian symmetry. In this work we study vortices in a Maxwell-Higgs model, in which the gauge symmetry is enhanced to accommodate additional symmetries, responsible to generate localized structures to be used to constrain the vortex structure in a given region in the plane. The main aim is to examine how the vortex profile changes when it inhabits a limited region, an issue of current interest to the study of vortices at the nanometric scale.

9 pages, 11 figures; v2, new results and references added, to appear in Phys. Rev. Research